The Starlings Page 9

  Today they had defeated Hawthorn by eleven points in a slogging match played in the slippery wet. Lethal hadn’t played gloriously; all Tuck’s brilliance had failed to affect the outcome; and the umpire had made decisions which were scandalous and plain brainless. The only cheer my father had managed to derive from the game had been the slogan on the Hawthorn cheer squad’s run-through banner, which, in a witty attack on the club as well as its parking facilities, had read: Who’d want to park within two miles of your ground anyway? He chuckled as he told us this, but speedily reverted to desolation.

  ‘I don’t know what the umpire had against poor old Dermie,’ he said, morosely attacking his plate. ‘He couldn’t do a thing right. Hamstrung, all day.’

  I made a sympathetic noise.

  ‘I don’t know about Jeans,’ he grumbled. ‘He’s not a fool, mind you. But I don’t think he thinks his tactics through.’

  Allan Jeans was the Hawks’ coach. The previous week he had been a tactician of genius.

  ‘How was Grandpa, Nicky?’ asked my mother, after waiting a decent interval to see if my father had any more complaints to air.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. Was this my moment?

  ‘Did you do the jigsaw?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it easier now, with your glasses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Grandpa seemed okay, did he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Was he on his own?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  My mother made a tsk-tsk noise.

  ‘Rose was there, was she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, why did you say tsk-tsk like that?’

  ‘Of course it’s bad,’ said my father.

  My mother made the not in front of the children face at him, but he ignored it.

  ‘What’s she doing, still hanging around?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ said my mother. ‘She’s probably just tying up some loose ends.’

  ‘Ha!’ exclaimed my father.

  ‘Was she doing anything, Nicky,’ asked my mother.

  ‘She was helping me with the jigsaw,’ I said. I watched, for dramatic effect. ‘And she was cuddling Grandpa.’

  Any doubts about how interested my family would be in this announcement were instantly dispelled.

  ‘In front of you?’ gasped my mother.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, not exactly. They were having a cuddle when I arrived.’

  ‘What sort of a cuddle?’ asked Pippa.

  ‘Pippa!’ said my mother.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘We all want to know. Go on, Nicky, What sort of a cuddle?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, prevaricating, making the moment last. It was exhilarating, commanding all their attention.

  Pippa persisted. ‘Was it a passionate cuddle? A friendly cuddle?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said my mother. ‘How can he answer that?’

  ‘It was amorous,’ I said.

  There was silence.

  ‘Amorous!’ said my mother.

  ‘Are you making this up, Nicky?’ my father asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, with indignation. ‘Why would I make it up?’

  ‘He’s always very truthful,’ said my mother.

  Everybody studied me.

  ‘You are truthful, aren’t you, Nicky?’ she added.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Did they say anything?’ asked Pippa.

  ‘They said hello and how are you and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what I mean, Nicky. Did they say anything about kissing?’

  ‘I didn’t say they were kissing,’ I said. ‘I said they were cuddling.’

  ‘Yes, but were they kissing?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  A frisson ran around the table. My mother pulled herself together. ‘It’s quite wrong for us to be talking in this way,’ she said. ‘This is all Grandpa’s business and nothing to do with us.’

  ‘It is to do with us,’ protested Pippa. ‘Grandpa’s our family. If he’s having—well, if he’s doing something with Rose, it’s got a lot to do with us.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ said my father abruptly. ‘We’ll talk no more about this.’

  ‘What you mean,’ said Pippa, ‘is that you and Mum will talk about it when Nicky and I aren’t there.’

  ‘That’s enough from you,’ said my father. ‘We want none of your cheekiness.’

  Pippa made a face.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said my mother, more to herself than to any of us.

  ‘We’ll discuss it later, Jenny,’ said my father.

  ‘See?’ muttered Pippa.

  She caught me later, when I was cleaning my teeth. ‘You caused a stir,’ she said, half-mockingly.

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’ I turned the tap off and put the toothbrush back in its glass tumbler.

  ‘Not at all? Oh, come on, Nicky.’

  ‘I didn’t know they’d take it like that.’ I wasn’t sure if this was completely truthful, but I said it anyway.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘now you do know.’

  ‘If Grandpa wants to cuddle Rose,’ I said, ‘isn’t that all right? As long as she wants to cuddle him back?’

  ‘Think about it. Listen, Nicky, would you like Rose as your grandma?’

  ‘That’s silly,’ I said, confused. ‘Rose isn’t nearly old enough to be a grandma.’

  ‘But that’s exactly the problem, don’t you see?’

  I didn’t see, and was beginning to regret the spotlight of my disclosure. In spite of the fact that Rose had told me that there was no secret, and suggested that she even wanted my family to be enlightened, I felt as if the weight of their judgment fell on her, rather than on Grandpa, for reasons I couldn’t establish. When my mother came to say goodnight, she sat on my bed for a while, humming, twisting a curl around her finger. I waited.

  ‘Nicky,’ she said. ‘When you were at Grandpa’s today.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ I said.

  ‘You said they were cuddling.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Nicky, was Grandpa—was he—kissing Rose?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But, I mean, on the lips?’

  I thought about this. ‘You can’t kiss somebody if you don’t use your lips.’

  ‘But was he kissing Rose’s lips?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, this is so awful,’ she murmured, but I didn’t know whether she meant it was awful to question me in such detail or awful that the thing had happened at all. ‘And Nicky, did it go on for long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They were doing it when I got there. When they knew I was there, they stopped.’

  ‘So they knew you saw them?’ She ran a hand through her dark curls.

  ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘And Rose said, when I left, she said they didn’t have secrets.’

  ‘Didn’t have secrets? Rose said that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you think she meant, Nicky?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was restive under this questioning. ‘Mummy, why don’t you just talk to Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I will talk to Grandpa.’

  I burrowed down under the blankets to indicate that the interview was now over, but she continued to sit there, examining her hands, frowning. I closed my eyes. After a minute or two I peeped, but she was still there, still frowning.

  It wasn’t until mid-week that I heard anything further. It was the usual way of it: early evening, my mother preparing dinner, my father slouching at the kitchen table with his whisky. I, all ears, was in the sunroom. So was Pippa, reading over in the corner in one of the big old elephant-grey leather armchairs that were so comfortable to curl up in.

  ‘No, I haven’t said anything,’ said my mother. She had been chopping something, and now paused.
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br />   ‘You’ve hardly had the opportunity, I suppose.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, half-laughing in a vexed way. ‘If I really wanted to, I could have created the opportunity a dozen times. It’s not as if he lives on the other side of the city. And I could ring, anyway. Though it’s a conversation I’d rather not have on the phone, that’s true.’

  ‘It’ll get worse, the longer you put it off.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  ‘Clear the air. If there is hanky-panky going on, at least you’ll find out. You’ll feel much better.’

  (Hanky-panky! I wondered if this phrase, which I hadn’t heard before, might explain the fuss about Othello’s hanky.)

  ‘You do it, then.’ My mother’s voice was acquiring its clipped tones. ‘Have a man-to-man with him. You do it.’

  ‘God, no. It needs to be you.’

  A pause.

  ‘I’m not sure what to say, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘You never see the problem,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Well, but really, Jen. You want to know what’s going on. Don’t you?’

  ‘I can hardly turn up at his place and bang the table and say, What’s going on?’

  ‘No, but there are different ways of saying the same thing. You don’t have to bang the table.’

  ‘No?’ said my mother dryly. ‘What would you recommend saying?’

  ‘You could just ask him how things are going.’

  ‘And when he says, Fine, thank you?’

  ‘Then you push a little harder. I mean, if your father is making a damn fool of himself, you do need to know, don’t you?’

  ‘Frank, I appreciate you’re trying to help, but really, let’s just drop it, shall we?’

  And my father said, in a different tone, ‘It’s hard to get it right, isn’t it? If I don’t say anything I get told I’m distancing myself from you and not contributing to family life. If I try to talk about it I get told to butt out.’

  Pippa raised her head.

  ‘Please, Frank,’ said my mother. ‘Can we just drop it, please?’

  My father’s voice had lowered, but I could still hear every word.

  ‘Okay, fine. Consider it dropped. But next time you think it’d be nice to have my contribution, you might remember that when I actually do my best to contribute you say, Let’s drop it.’

  My mother made a small, startled mewing noise.

  ‘Because we always play it by your rules, don’t we, Jenny? Don’t we?’

  He got up and walked out. My eyes met Pippa’s; then, unaccountably embarrassed, I dropped them. Some moments passed. Out in the kitchen, my mother resumed chopping.

  With all these confusions, I found that my attitudes towards the Heroes of the Cosmos were shifting. My relationship with Fleshbane in particular was complex, perverse even.

  Fleshbane was badness incarnate: his formal title in the Cosmos was Lord of Darkness. He appeared to have no redeeming qualities: he was Iago, the Black Knight, Jack the Ripper, Satan. He was a kidnapper, a thief in the night, a murderer, a brilliant and unscrupulous criminal; he had no conscience and no morality. There was nothing that was so wicked it was beyond Fleshbane’s range.

  Why, then, I wondered, was I so fond of him?

  He was grotesque, with his bulging green muscles and cruel, mask-like face. But Zarlok’s anatomy was just as bizarre. In fact, nearly all the Heroes of the Cosmos were characterised by their unlikely body shapes, their tiny waists and neat, round buttocks, together with burstingly huge chests and biceps and thighs (loins, I called them). And I came to think Zarlok’s face was blank, and far from reassuring: it revealed little of the nobility and intelligence with which I credited him. Also, he had yellow hair, which I disliked. Sometimes Zarlok displayed a goody-goody streak that irritated me, and in the battles I organised between them I could feel myself increasingly drawn to Fleshbane. I tried to resist this attraction, sensing in it something dangerous, but when I wanted comfort I slipped Fleshbane into my pocket and not Zarlok. Sometimes, it is true, I chose Brutum, whose hopeless ugliness inspired compassion and friendship. But, generally speaking, it was Fleshbane whose knobbly limbs and webbed feet and tough body I silently fingered in my pocket to give me consolation in difficult situations. Like the football.

  It was Fleshbane, I think, who encouraged me to think of good and evil in relative rather than in absolute terms, and who made me see that unexpected ambiguities quivered behind moral definitions. The aggressive death-mask of his face was so hideous that I felt it couldn’t be real: there must be another Fleshbane, or at least another side of Fleshbane, hiding behind it. Fleshbane was mean, but he was brave; he could be cruel, but he was lonely; further, he was strong and resolute and clever. And the swell of tenderness I felt for him, trapped as he was in his bright green body and his withered face with its sad red eyes, meant that some part of me came to be on Fleshbane’s side. I wanted Fleshbane to find the Holy Grail. Just once. And the story of Balyn, the Knight of the Dolorous Stroke, would give him that opportunity.

  The Holy Grail continued to intrigue me. For something so desirable, it was profoundly without use. Moreover, I regarded anything linked to religion as distinctly suspicious. So far as I could see, little else about King Arthur and his knights revealed religious tendencies. But in Roger Lancelyn Green’s book, when Balyn came to his senses after three comatose days, Merlin said to him: You have struck the Dolorous Stroke and laid waste three counties. For the cup you saw was the Holy Grail wherefrom our blessed Lord Jesus Christ drank the wine at the Last Supper. This bothered me for its religious overtones; and there was apparently a logical connection between laying waste three counties and witnessing the Grail, which was not evident to me and which certainly hadn’t been known by Balyn. Poor old Balyn hadn’t understood any of the consequences of the Dolorous Stroke. Presumably he hadn’t even known it was the Dolorous Stroke he was striking when he hit King Pelles. And he didn’t know the shining cup had anything to do with Jesus. I supposed he shouldn’t have hurt King Pelles, but in an environment when everybody was always either attacking or being attacked it wasn’t at all fair that this particular misdeed had turned out to be so significant; furthermore, he had been affected (not for the first time) by sudden madness. There had been no prior warning. Anyone should have a warning.

  What’s more, when Merlin prophesied the Dolorous Stroke he spoke of it as if Balyn had no option.

  I decided to write a new version of Balyn and the Dolorous Stroke and the Holy Grail—including Balyn’s helplessness in the face of Fate, as well as his sheer bad luck.

  The tale of Balyn starts at King Arthur’s court. Reading my book, I learned that Balyn, a young knight at the court, had lately been in prison for killing a cousin of King Arthur’s. I couldn’t find out who this cousin was, or why Balyn killed him, but it must have been difficult for Balyn to do well at the court of Arthur with this black stain on his history. I envisaged him ambling, lonely, around the jousting fields, perhaps picking daffodils in a disconsolate way; or sidling up to groups of knights who sloped off as they saw him approach.

  Then a damsel enters and asks for help in ridding herself of a sword that is fastened to her side. None of the knights except Balyn can manage to draw this sword from its sheath, but he is then seduced by its glamour and refuses to give it back to the damsel. This is the first of a series of bad decisions Balyn makes before he and his brother Balan eventually kill each other—accidentally—in battle.

  Zarlok was obviously destined to be Arthur, and Balyn would be played by Fleshbane: these two, as principal characters, were not required to share. There were numerous damsels and two of them were to be decapitated: Crystal was ideal for this kind of role, because the rubber band through her neck was loose. (In any case, I would never have put the Rose doll in a situation where she might suffer that kind of pain and indignity.) Balyn’s brother, Balan, didn’t have much to do, so I gave that part to Karkin (always diffi
cult, because of his deformed claw-like hand, to cast appropriately). Then there were sundry other characters, including Merlin, Launceor, the invisible knight Garlon, a number of other knights, and various damsels, including the Lady of the Lake. Atrox the Giant Lion and Slyder the Golden Stripe were also included, because they were necessary as transport.

  The beginning of the play, in my exercise book, went like this:

  ACT ONE

  King Arthur’s Court.

  Fleshbane/Balyn: Oh, I am passing sad and nobody will talk to me because I have slain Arthur’s cousin.

  Enter Damsel 1.

  Crystal/Damsel 1: Is there no knight who can manage to draw this sword I bear at my side?

  Various knights try but cannot do it.

  Crystal/Damsel 1: Oh, alas! Am I doomed to carry this sword forever?

  Fleshbane/Balyn: Here, let me have a try. (Draws sword)

  Crystal/Damsel 1: This is a passing good knight. But now I pray you, sir, to give me back my sword.

  Fleshbane/Balyn: No! This sword and I shall never part!

  Crystal/Damsel 1: No, no, you must not keep it.

  Fleshbane/Balyn: I will keep it!

  Crystal/Damsel 1: But it was given to me by the Lady of the Lake.

  Fleshbane/Balyn: I don’t care.

  Exit Damsel 1, lamenting. Enter the Lady of the Lake.

  Crystal/Lady of the Lake: King Arthur, you owe me a gift, so give me the head of Sir Balyn.

  Zarlok/Arthur: No, I can’t do that.

  Fleshbane/Balyn: Ho! Evil woman, you want my head? Rather you shall lose your own. (Balyn cuts off the Lady of the Lake’s head) Oh, what have I done? A madness has come over me.

  Zarlok/Arthur: Alas, Balyn, for shame. I will never forgive you for this deed.

  Fleshbane/Balyn: But she was an evil lady, who had killed many people. And I did not know what I was doing. Lo, a madness came over me.